This is Andrew Hovell's blog. He lives in Northern England. He plans for a living. He likes tea

August 31, 2010

So I'm back from a week's holiday, staying with Mum and Dad in Cornwall. Had a lovely time, my little boy gamboled in the sand and splashed in the sea, gurgling like a maniac while all and sundry wanted a play and a cuddle. Made me all reflective about growing up having holidays in St Ives myself, looking forward to doing all those fun things with him that my parents did with me.

As you might imagine, Mum kept on getting out masses of pictures of me when I was younger to see any similarities(it's uncanny how me and the poor boy look alike), and it made me realise that all family photography is propaganda. It's staged managed to edit out the sulks, the arguments and the realness.

There's nothing wrong with that of course, but so much gets missed out. When we got married, we hired two photographers; one for the usual posed pictures, but also another to take continuous reportage of the day, not asking people to pose, just recording what was actually happening.

If I'm honest, I prefer the reportage ones, they're so much richer, which is priceless to me, since a big failing of any wedding day is how much the bride and groom don't get to see and do. I don't remember much, it was too much of blur.

Anyway, Mum got out some pictures from a family trip to Germany when I was around six. My sisters where competing (I was too young) and we all went.

Back then, swim teams didn't stay in hotels, they stayed with willing families from local teams, and returned the favour when they came to over. We stayed with a lovely family, they were so kind and thoughtful. It was one of the best family holidays I can remember.

Anyway, the pictures were not just 'staged' the older brother in their family was a keen photographer and was constantly snapping what was going on. He was kind enough to give my Mum a copy of the prints and there's everything on there. Me arguing with my older sister (we always did) a picture of Mum and Dad that somehow shows them as a romantic couple having a quit moment rather than Mum and Dad..lots of stuff that seems to show how things were rather than how we like to believe.

Here's two pictures of me, one 'staged' in colour, one black and white, taken while I wasn't looking not (not scanned in case you're wondering about the the white splash thing that came from my camera flash)

I can't show pictures with everyone else, I don't have permission and there are better ones, but still, the black and white one captures something the other doesn't.

It brings back what it felt like to be that age. I remember wanting to play and stuff like other kids, but my I used to spend hours just daydreaming about things by myself too. That's why I was such a clumsy kid, my mind was elsewhere. That's I drive Mrs Northern mental - mid-conversation she can see my eyes glaze over as my mind just goes somewhere else.

I hadn't thought about being like that as a child for ages. I was very lonely at times, my sisters were swimming every weekend which meant tagging along, spending hours and hours at yet another swimming pool with no one to play with. That's one reason I started swimming, just so I could join in.

Don't misunderstand, I'm not complaining, I was very lucky with the love and fun I had with my parents and the other kids I grew up with, some who are now by best friends. But I had be adept at occupying myself at times- and learned to love drawing, writing and reading for fun and, well, daydreaming.

But I couldn't tell you if I 'got' good at occupying myself, or I was just like that anyway. I often thought it was the former, but coming back to being on holiday with my little boy, I realised how thoughtful he's already becoming and how good he is at playing on his own (not that he gets much chance), maybe it's just how I am and a part of how he will be too.

Funny how a few pictures that haven't been 'stage managed' can make you think eh? So I'll be making sure that my boy gets to see some pictures and video that show how our lives really were when he was growing up.

If you're a client going through ten chemistry meetings, you're bound to receive eleven different versions of 'we seek to understand what makes people tick'. If you meet any planner, they'll hopefully remember that amidst the billion things the job seems to require these days, their primary role isn't to be shrill for the work, it's to build strategy to influence what real people do in real lives...in short, suits make the work happen, creatives make the work good, planners make the work, ahem, work.

Yet how many agencies and their planners REALLY understand people. I don't mean unreliable findings from the biggest mouth in a focus group, or a bit of profiling on TGI (TGI's good by the way, it's actually a qual tool, not quant, enabling you to get a feel for the people you need to engage with and know there's enough of them - but it only gets to generalisations, you need to dig a lot deeper than that), I mean knowing what really influences and motivates them.

I think half of that is going out and meeting them - part anthropologist - in their own environment. People are useless at describing what they did and why, or even how they felt. The only reliable way is to be there as it happens. That's why even co-creation in an artificial environment is bollocks, people won't act on genuine instinct, they'll be developing stuff based on their own generalisations of other people, and what they THINK the brand wants, not what they REALLY want...they don't really know what they want.

The other half of that is amateur psychology. Bill Bernbach said 'there's nothing so powerful as an insight into human nature' and that still holds true. There are universal truths about how people behave and what motivates them. They more you understand about this, the better. I don't mean playing back these truths to people, that's useless. I do means understanding what role you can play, what problem you can solve in people's lives.

There's a lot to be said for this tool, I think MC Saatchi still use a variation on this.

I can't abide all that 'brutal simplicity of thought' stuff, but finding a connection between a truth about people (not 'consumers') and what the brand is about, or what it can deliver can be really powerful. This work is all based on the connection between the truth that we all respect people who can do what we cannot and the fact that most people are not cut out to be a police officer:

Johnie Walker relieves the contradiction between the masculine need for success and a growing distaste for conspicuous consumptions by re framing male success as personal progress, rather than having arrived ( and that in Asia that requires referencing brotherhood and belonging, rather than 'me'.

Pepsi knows that every generation feels like they want to change the world, but that they have a chance to change things, they just get to protest a lot and then grow up.

August 17, 2010

I can't remember if i've talked about Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic or not, but I've been dipping back in for something or other at work. If you haven't read it and you work on something to do with cars, you should, there are lots of fresh perspectives on stuff. If you don't work on cars, you should too, it tells you new things about people. Anyway...

I'm still amazed by the bits that remind you what an amazing feat driving is.

It's made up of 1,500 sub-skills, we make about 20 decisions per mile, process 1,300 pieces of information per minute. It's incredible. But we do it so easilly, we don't really dwell on it, but in world where they can build robots to calculate in a second what it would take a human all their life, the best any robot can do is last a couple of seconds driving in an average high street.

I think that's interesting from a road safety persective. Instead of the usual 'shock and awe' stuff you usually see on from government funded stuff, how interesting would it be to start with a complement tell people how amazing they are every day? The fact we take it for granted leads to over confidence and most accidents. We're all vain, why not seduce with flattery rather than bludgeon with fear?

So I'm finally doing the Great North Swim two weeks on Saturday. I forgot to mention that I'm trying to raise money for Cancer Research as well as grasp at youth. If you're any way inclined, you can sponsor me here.

I chose them because I lost two Grandparents to cancer and seeing the way the one I have left (90) lights up when she sees my baby boy makes we wish they had been around to see him too (in case you're wondering the fourth died before I was born).

August 13, 2010

I remember the legendary George Parker talking about his experience at a 'Big Dumb Agency' (his words). Where the Chief Exec asked him what he thought they did. He said, "We make ads'. To which she replied, "No, we manage the process". In other words, sell a professional process, that of course takes ages and uses a lot of people and charge for their time. Not sell ideas.

That's still the model in lots of places and it's wrong. It's dangerously seductive, like the dark side, it's quicker, easier.

But it's wrong.

Wrong commercially, as clients undervalue your ideas and start getting you to trim budgets and therefore people - ultimately harming the work and it's effectiveness...so you end up getting fired.

It's wrong internally as it demotivates people who (hopefully are there to do great work.

It's wrong because it lets laziness and mediocrity off the hook. There's nothing that lets lazy, untalented people thrive like a good process. Who cares about the quality of a brief if all the boxes are filled and it fits on a page? Who cares if the work is pedestrian is it's 'Disruptive' or 'Brutally Simple'. It doesn't matter if the brand's position in unworkable, it came out of a workshop.

And let's not kid ourselves. We don't ever have ideas in a linear fashion. Sometimes they pop up near the start and you spend some time proving they're good. Sometimes you're terrified that it's near the deadline and nothing good is coming, then it appears in the nick of time. Usually, in fact, most if the time, ideas emerge when you're doing anything but 'work'.

That's right, the more you work at a process, the harder you make it for yourself.

August 11, 2010

I was looking at some old video from a 2007 conference from the always brilliant PSFK (incidentally, Piers and co, if you want to give away a free ticket to the 2010 London conference, to a blogger who will post about it etc, you my email address is on the side bar....).

A big thread of that day the tension between old advertising and new digital. It was relevant then. Blogs were still hot news, Facebook was still in college, while digital agencies and ad agencies looked at each other with mutual suspicion, or even derision.

There was lots of chat about how ad agencies were adapting to the new digital world, while digital agencies moved up the food chain to own brand ideas rather than execute them. But while things have moved on the real world - the web blurring into the physical world, Telly on digital digital on TV..blah di blah, it's mostly the same damned conversation that just doesn't matter anymore.

Only last week, I opened Campaign Magazine for the first time in ages to find a double paged spread on 'integration' as the future. For the love of God.

Let's dispel the myth that there was a golden age when most agencies were brilliant. They were not. Most of the ads you saw on TV in th 1980's were crap, most of the agencies were not really any good, clients hadn't figured out their act. And guess what? Most of th ads you in 2010 are still crap. Most ad agencies are still not any good. But it's immatures for digital natives (don't you just hate that term) to berate all ad people, or non-digital specialists as stupid, crap or behind the times. It's plain wrong to say that people ignore telly or telly ads. They don't, they just ignore the bad stuff. And that's not entirely true. Most ad people hate Proctor and Gamble's work (Old Spice excluded) but they just keep chugging along nicely.

Let's also burst that digital bubble too. The internet hasn't banished stupid. Most digital agencies are crap too. Some are great, most are not, most love the technology and have conveniently forgotten to influence people, or trot our the same cliche about creating conversations without creating something worth talking about.

And media people, yes you, some of you show clients how when and how to engage, but most sell plans. Most think comms strategy ends at when and where, forgetting that context, how and relevance matter too. And let's not get into forcing digital stuff to work like broadcast.....

The truth is, the market for something people believe in is infinite. The possibilities for getting away with not being good are fading. Good places can't be arsed with false distinctions between online and offline...because real people don't make that distinction. They're getting on with having ideas that build brands and profit. They don't worry too much about brands as verbs, conversations, etc...they just create stuff people want to be involved with and let them.

If you're smart, talented, open minded and want to work hard, you'll be fine. If you're not and you want to continue this bogus conversation around a dividing lin that only exists in agency world's (and a few bad clients') collective imaginations, you may have some problems.

August 10, 2010

I'm currently grappling with Drive by Daniel H Pink. It's yes another book about what motivates people, but what sets it apart is that it avoids wild theory and draws upon four decades of scientific research. In other words, proper rigour.

I raced through it at first, but it's in my bag and I keep on getting it out to check something else and think about it a bit more.

The basic premise is that organisations need to stop trying to motivate people through carrots and sticks and focus on the true elements of what drives people:

Autonomy - the desire to direct our own lives

Mastery - the urge to get better and better at something that matters (to you)

Purpose - the yearning to do something in the service of something larger than ourselves

I think this is brilliant. There's lots for ad people, especially planners to ponder when it comes to persuading people, being useful or the pillars they should build brands on. For example, looking for ideas that people can play a part in, brand having a genuine purpose that brings together both internal and external and genuine usefulness for people to fully explore their passions and interests. That's just scratching surface.

It says so much more about how organisations should manage people in the 21st century - and agencies in particular. Does your agency feel like it cares about those things?

So it was the regular Saturday morning pain and suffering swim session this weekend. In the pool for 7.30am to cover swim four miles or so.

I've been improving quickly since I altered my stroke and these sessions have reminded me how to really push it. My body has actually changed shape, the shoulders are broader, the arm muscles longer,tougher, but smaller; little things like that.

This one was special. There's a pecking order of lanes, with the top two for people who can really motor. I tried one these lanes a couple of weeks ago and my body caved in, but I was made to try it again.

Last time, there was point when it began to hurt and I dug in to find nothing. Quite the opposite, I seized up. This time that point took longer to arrive and when it did I found another gear. I wasn't just living with the other swimmers, I was challenging them.

It's an amazing feeling to reach into yourself and find something extra there. When you can't do anymore and you just want to give in, going that little bit further pulls something out of you'd forgotten was there.

It felt good. I still won't do as well at The Great North Swim as I wanted, but I need to feel that gear again. So I'll be carrying on training at this pace when it's all over. Addicted I'm afraid.

August 09, 2010

I really like Lurpak's Bake Club. It's not devastatingly cool or clever, there's no killer app or amazing use of technology, it's just really useful and makes me feel nice. People are getting used to technology that we would have thought impossible ten years ago. You can't flash bastard people into engagement anymore, guess what? It's back to ideas for people.

I like the way it's designed for humans rather than ad people. I can't speak for other people, I don't know the strategy, but as a person, I like the way it brings people together, it doesn't want to turn them into Delia Smith, just do something you're proud of to share on a regular basis.

That's what I like about baking, it's something you do for other people far more than cooking. I don't really bake much, but I want to get good so Will and I can do it together. We'll get in trouble with Mum for making a mess in the kitchen of course, but that's half the fun.

I hate British motorway services. I haven't driven enough in other counties to know if this is something peculiar to this country, but they are truly dreadful. At this time of year, with families driving off for a summer holiday, they pretty much hold them to ransom.

You either pack a picnic (which isn't a bad idea, there's nothing finer than a poached chicken torn apart and put into sandwiches with lots of mayonnaise - or the humble and undervalued scotch egg) or put up with hugely expensive, very bad quality, chemical laden junk.

It's not entirely the vendors' faults though. They have to pay a huge sum to get a franchise, so that the only way they can make money is charge a lot for something cheap.

There must another way, and maybe there is. There are little villages and towns just off every motorways all over the country with perfectly brilliant little cafes and the like. For the sake of the 2 minutes to drive an extra half mile you could be having tea made in the pot and some homemade soup with a crusty roll, a lovingly hand made sandwich or, best of all, a full english breakfast without taking out a mortgage. Of course, the problem is finding them....

All it would take would someone to organise a network of cafe and food lovers to start sharing where these places are, rate them etc, then create something to work with your smart phone's GPS so you could find them. In a couple of years, new cars will be connected to the web and have all sorts of apps and stuff, like this or this.

Then you would only need to stop at a service station for petrol, sweets or a magazine. If you wanted good food, you could get it.

August 06, 2010

Today I woke up and realised I've been in advertising, or whatever you want to call it now (I think advertising is still best, digital, content whatever, it's still giving people an impression of something so they want to buy it/do it/stop doing it), for 12 years. Jesus Christ. I'm old, with some level of experience.

I've made some big decisions along the way. One was not wanting to work in London, another was choosing small and quality of life and being a proper Dad to my little boy. over big, famous and endless hours. It's just about possible that, after for, or with very different agencies, I might have some decent thoughts about what makes a good and what doesn't. Then again, who cares what a planner working in Sheffield thinks? Just in case.........

Don't hire advertising people

What we do has to find a way to be at least as interesting as the culture it tries to pull attention from. That means you need people who are interested in that culture rather than just ads. There's a common breed called Homo Advertisingus who only reads D&AD, APG papers etc, who's only source of inspiration is, well advertising. Guess what? Try and make advertising and that's exactly what you get. Something that looks like something else, or is designed to impress a Tony Davidson a Stef Calcraft or a John Steele. If you want interesting work, hire interesting people, they may know nothing about advertising and maybe that's a good thing. And agencies that encourage and give people to do and look at interesting stuff is a good idea too.

Don't expect people to fit in

There's Homo Advertisingus, but there's also sub-species. Far too many agencies have a fixed idea of the kind of person they want to hire. They have to fit in with the culture. Now an organisation's culture is critical, but if everyone thinks and acts the same way there's no point. If you surround yourself with people like you. you'll only ever get one opinion or one answer. You want your staff to be challenged, to be exposed to all sorts of stuff. The Disruption Agency for example is remarkably conservative about who it hires and how they want their staff to behave.

But do have a culture

People want to feel like they're working towards some kind of collective purpose. That's not the business plan, that's not profit. A strong sense of what the place is about helps. Mother wants to create work that's culturally famous, BBH is brainy etc.

Have a leader

I've worked in places with strong inspirational leaders and places with managers. Agency's seem to do better with a figurehead. Not a dictator, someone you want to work until midnight for, someone who can pick you up when you're having a bad day.

Don't focus on money

There are not many agency people who really care about money. They want to live well, but it's not their reason for being there. They want to love what they do and create great work (if they don't you have a problem). Focus on the work, make it brilliant and the money follows. But hire someone to worry about the money. That's the problem with massive agency networks, it all becomes about quarterly targets.

Don't worry about people's ages

You need kids to shake up the old timers. You need old timers to calm the kids down. The tension works well. It shouldn't matter how old someone is if they're still interested.

So challenge your people

Don't flog them to death, but do encourage them to keep moving forward. There's nothing more rewarding than mastery of your given job and nothing more dangerous. Help people have the courage to venture our of their comfort zone, of they feel they're moving forward, they'll stay longer

But appreciate the support staff

There's always some who are more reliable than amazing. You need them too

Don't pretend to be professional

Agencies waste of time convincing clients we're just like them. We're not. We're creative people. They're not. That's why they hire us. There isn't a linear process, we just do stuff until something emerges, then pretend it was otherwise.

Don't pretend to be something you're not

Some agencies are genuinely cool, some are very hardworking, some are fun, some are very brainy. Most think about what agency they would like to be and pretend they are. It never works. Establish what you're culture and strengths are and focus on those.

Be good, not different

Most agencies do exactly the same thing, it's just that some do it better. Focus on being really good rather than really different. No one cares about your proprietary process, they do care if your work makes them tingle.

That's my idea of what an agency should focus on. You probably have another.

Working on ghd was as close to working on a Nike or an Apple as it gets if you work outside if London in the UK. One of the problems on working on a brands like that is that the industry at large always thinks it knows what made that particular brand great.

I always felt working on ghd that the world and his wife wanted to tell me why ghd had got to where it had (£100 million turnover in 5 years etc) and what should be done with it, commercially, as a brand, what the ads and stuff needed to be. Not everybody was 100% wrong but no one was 100% right. Because they didn't know the business, they hadn't seen the tracking, they hadn't done the segmentation, they didn't see the client, they didn't talk to women about ghd and their hair week in week out.

I had a few ideas about it before I worked on it, some strong opinions about the work and the brand in general. I was almost completely wrong, but didn't know that until I started working on it. So what's my point?

I think it's healthy to have an opinion on other people's work and think about what the strategy was. It's good to look at the work and have a view in the creative idea and how it's executed. But it doesn't make much sense to think you know better than the people that worked on it - unless the people who've worked on it have told you.

That's why I have a problem with lots of business books with half baked theories and case studies of stuff they haven't done. By default, they don't KNOW why something worked. They only have an opinion. That's why I hate Campaigns creative review, it's a bit of fun, but in the end, it's someone's opinion...and this industry finds it really hard to say anything good about other people's work.

August 05, 2010

What kind of planner are you? Brand planner? Engagement planner? Digital planner? Content planner? I'm not sure which one I am and to be honest when I started out (which wasn't that long ago) I was just an account planner. The only other kind of planner out there was a media planner.

I still think I'm just an account planner - which means most of what I do is develop brand ideas - very long term strategy - and communications ideas, which basically means what do this year, this quarter and this week. Sometimes I've been lucky enough to get involved in NPD and stuff, which is happening more as it become part of marketing rather than marketing making sense something another department made, but that's another story.

By and large, I help create ideas rather than where the idea need to go. More and more, that's been ideas BEFORE deciding where to show up,rather than 'the answer's advertising, what's the question?' But transmedia planning isn't a theory, it's a reality. Ideas as narrative etc become essential but you can't escape having to bake in ideas about engagement into the creative process and vice versa.

In my opinion, no planner can do both the creative planning and the engagement - they might have the talent but no one has the sheer time and mental space to do both really well. From my point of view, I need to work with someone who can do the engagement bit as soon as possible.

So if there's a engagement planner to work with, work as a team from the start. The best work from the APG awards this last year were as much about context and the right place to show up as they were about creative execution. What drove the case study for Axe's Wake Up Call was the realisation that young males use their phone as an alarm clock, which provided a great place to show up in the morning routine - where usage of Axe was low, for example. What drove Nokia's 'Someone else's phone' idea was the two observations that for young people a phone is an integral is their keys and they live their lives through them.

Most of us are not lucky enough to have engagement planners to work with, but there will be media planners your client uses. Collaborate as soon as possible. They may want to do more obvious, traditional stuff, but less and less these days. They have all sorts of data you won't have - work with them and develop joint ideas rather than 'the creative bit and the media bit'. And from my point of view, media agencies are trying to do creative. Most of it is laughable, but watch out nevertheless.

So, call yourself what you like, but really you either do planning for creative ideas or for engagement ideas.Which one do you want to be? Whichever that might be, learn to love the other side that does what you cannot.

August 02, 2010

It's only four weeks until the Great North Swim and I'm nowhere near bloody ready. It's going to be more survival than doing well, partly down to waiting too long to do anything about my bad stroke, partly down to a baby boy precluding training nearly enough. No point moaning about stuff you can't change. I'll finish and I'll finish in style, I just know I'll be annoyed knowing I could have done better.

The thing is, it was never really about the result, I needed a goal to keep me going. It's tough getting out of bed at 6.15 when you've haven't been allowed to sleep by a teething baby. And so it turned out, without the added motivation, I would have trained less and been more miserable for it.

But the thing about a journey is that you're never sure what you pick up along the way, and what you gain is not always what you expected. It's the premise for one of my favourite ad campaigns:

...but that's not the point. In the quest to sort out the stroke, I found out about some intensive training session for oldies that haven't quite lost it and want get more if it back. They're bloody hard. 7.30am on a Saturday morning, my new regular date with pain and suffering. But it's great to be training with people again. Having a coach and people around makes you push that little bit harder. No chance of kidding yourself you're working hard, with these session you know you are.

So all that's good, I've a new regular thing to look forward/dread. But the first time I went, I bumped into someone I used to swim with more than twenty years ago. It was lovely to see her and find out what she's been up to (I still can't close the circle and get my head around her being a Mum of two). Anyway, it brought lots of memories of those times and the people I spent it with. It hurst to think of those days and know they're gone forever, but it's also good to think about them and how great those times were. Made me realise I'd kept in touch with them more.

That's why falling short of what I set out to do doesn't really matter. It's true of this and true of everything as far as I'm concerned.